


you are my sweetest downfall

by voodoochild



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Multiple Selves, The Power of Names, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2011-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River Song isn't who she appears to be, and she met the Doctor a long time before the Library.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are my sweetest downfall

**Author's Note:**

> Let's just call this my Grand and Unifying Theory of How River Song is the Rani. It involves at last count, five whackjob theories that have been floating around, a dozen nerdy Old Skool Who references that maybe four people will get, and more headcanon than you can shake a stick at.
> 
> Written for Colleen for the song prompt of "Samson", by Regina Spektor, and probably not what she was expecting. Mea culpa.

_I loved you first, loved you first  
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth  
I have to go, I have to go  
Your hair was long when we first met_

Their story is a moebius strip, told in an endless figure-eight with messages hidden in plain sight for the other to find. It always has been.

He thinks he met her at the end of her life, believes he had one shining day (as he does at least once, every life) where everyone lived in some form or another. That he'd saved her to the Library and she was existing in that electronic paradise with Miss Evangelista and her team. He thinks it was the first of many kindnesses.

The Library was a lie; maybe he gave River Song eternal life, but he didn't give her anything but another prison to escape. Gallifrey, Stormhold, the Library - cages all, some iron, some golden, and he was always good at caging her.

Whispering his name into his ear was a last-ditch resort and, as usual, made him jump to all the wrong conclusions. River Song could never have known, much less spoken, the name of a Time Lord. He believed her to be a future wife - future? No. Past would be closer to the truth.

Because what Theta never remembered was that there are three times a Time Lord's full name is spoken.

When they are born. When they are married. When they die. They must have done all three in the speaker's timeline to be spoken any other time.

He should have remembered the girl from Blyledge, a few months older than he, who played with him and another boy in red grass under an orange sky. The girl who attended the Academy with him, chose her nickname from that of a goddess in hopes she'd grow into it. Instead, she went renegade with him, fell in love with him in spite of herself, married him and had a daughter with him. The girl who named herself "queen" and betrayed him for his best friend.

Oh, she knows it would be a shock. The idiot thinks she died on Arcadia when the Master turned tail, but she lived the same way the Master had. Lived and learned what it was like to be truly human. She'd become River Song, taken up archeology and a relationship with the Doctor, of all things. Again.

(In this universe, at least. In others, she'd been killed by Faction Paradox. Taken prisoner by Davros and forced to work for the Daleks. Died at Koschei's side on the Cruciform.)

At the very least, the idiot might realize why she can write Old High Gallifreyan and pilot a TARDIS is because she's a Time Lady.

So many legends talk about the Last of the Time Lords - which is rubbish, because what with Koschei and Rassilon running around, it isn't as if Theta is actually the last - but there are none about the Time Ladies. He doesn't know about Rassilon's purges, about what happened to Romana and Susan and the rest. It's another thing she never wants Theta to find out about; just because he's an idiot doesn't mean she wants to cause him pain.

So she weaves in and out of his life, watches him go from spastic in pinstripes to young and cheeky in a bow tie to female and ginger to solemn and blue-eyed, back to a dandy in velvet and a blond cricketer. Each regeneration brings him closer to the truth.

Her diary has always had two parallel accounts - River's and hers - and that's why she teasingly keeps it out of the Doctor's reach. He'd know - about her, about the day she'll finally betray him again and regain her true self, about his final death on Malcassairo that will restore the River Song identity and send her to Stormcage.

Legends say that once you assume an identity via Chameleon Arch, that identity becomes part of you. And it's true, because just as the Doctor became more vicious and the Master more merciful, she has become regretful.

She is no longer the Rani, but perhaps via River, she can become Ushas again.


End file.
